News

Survey: '`deskless' workers miss critical job info

May 8, 2003

EMERYVILLE, Calif. -Three out of five employees are "e-mail exiles," distanced from headquarters, co-workers and even customers because they do not have access to e-mail, a survey has found.

The survey, commissioned by Sendmail Inc., Hewlett-Packard and Intel, said these workers include nurses, sales staff and warehouse managers; workers who are "deskless" because of their job functions. See related story, "Kiosks aid not-so-human resources."

These employees receive job-critical information like safety notices, customer requests, schedules or policy guidelines, much later than their wired counterparts. And they have no means of interacting with headquarters or contributing to the corporate culture other than by way of old-fashioned suggestion boxes or bulletin boards.

"Everyone's heard of the digital divide, but what's surprising is that it has widened so dramatically within enterprises that are otherwise technologically advanced," said John Stormer, vice president of marketing at Sendmail, in a news release.

The poll found that, although a small number of companies surveyed, 16 percent, use e-mail accessed from kiosks or mobile devices to communicate with deskless workers, the vast majority, 84 percent, still use more traditional methods, such as postal mail and inter-office memos.

Of this group, even the most technologically advanced only use one-way channels such as pagers or static intranet pages.